The "fee" to delete unfilled CX orders

I recently noticed that if you delete too many unfilled CX orders, eventually it complains that you’ve deleted too many orders recently and threatens to charge you a fee to delete based on how large the order is. It’s not a large number of deletes either, it can’t be more than 5 or 10 per… some time period.

First off does anyone know how many you are allowed to delete and over what time period they “decay”?

This discourages adapting offers to changing market conditions and slows down market price discovery. Isn’t that… really bad? Why is this done? I think we should be able to edit orders too, it certainly shouldn’t be discouraged.

The limit is 5 orders of the same product within a 24 hour period.

It’s there to prevent penny wars, whereby players with more time on their hands constantly reduce or increase their offers by 0.01 in order to be first in the queue without meaningfully moving the bid or ask price.

It doesn’t slow down market price discovery much, because any player who is truly trying to discover the market price will change their orders by more significant amounts. The players who want unlimited order cancellation are the ones who want to play as if they were high frequency trading bots.

TIck sizes have also been proposed as an additional measure to prevent penny wars and improve price convergence. But debate still rages over that one.

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That makes some sense at least. But I’m not engaging in that practice and I still got hit by it (I think I changed my mind once or twice in a market with a huge spread, or I had to delete a mistake). Maybe unlimited deletes is too much, but if the cap is going to stick around, it’d be nice to know how many deletes we have remaining. Now that I know, maybe I’ll be able to avoid it.

I admit I have been surprised at how many orders there are which are insignificantly different, it’s not even worth your time trying to save 10 CIS or 100 CIS on an order. Are people really that stubborn about doing a little math to realize that it’s pointless (even for a game)?

Price ticks… might help. I don’t think this current cap system is so perfect either. Order books with silly orders that are .01 higher than the next one are very common. It may discourage “penny wars” but it doesn’t discourage cheapshots like that. Emphasis on cheap, since they’re also only saving or earning additional pennies.

I don’t believe penny wars are truly about 10/100 CIS profit/saving. It’s about who gets the chance to sell/buy their product first since lower priced products even if by a cent gets sold before other large sale orders and vice versa for buy orders

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You’re probably right about that, it’s hard to know what people are thinking. But even then, I see this going on with small sized orders where they’ll probably both end up filled at the same time.

I’m looking at one right now:

100 74.01 CIS
3 74.00 CIS

OddPotato is right. When market prices are falling I do it to get my orders filled (cashed out) first and not end up within the order stack. They added a warning message now on the 4th try so you can avoid the deletion fees.

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Ah, you mean the message I must have totally ignored. lol
Oh well

I don’t believe penny wars are truly about 10/100 CIS profit/saving.

100%.

Low liquidity gives extra incentive to add/subtract a penny to move to the front of the queue.

+1 for tic sizes. It would make adjusting the price to beat the queue a more meaningful decision.

Simply dropping the decimal point .1 / .01 stuff would be a good start too for lower priced trading too.

What’s the opposition to tick/tic marks anyway? There’s a debate? (Oops this might start a new one…)

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I can’t really understand why this “penny war” thing bothers you so much.
To be honest, I would also drop this “max 5 changes per day”.
But I would make impossible to delete an order during the first 10/15 mins from creation, just to avoid abuses.

@Dramphyre If you mean me, it would be nice to have the order books look a little cleaner, but I don’t think I’ve voiced any support of combating penny wars. If anyone’s micromanaging pennies to earn next to nothing, I say let them.

You would probably do well with a compromise, drop decimals in trading entirely, drop or greatly increase the 5 trade/day limit, AND throttle the creation/deletion of trades for the first 10 minutes. (I’m not sure if it could be abused but I’ll take your word for it.)

It might not be a huge effect but at least then price discovery would happen a little more rapidly (converting penny wars into dollar wars), and order books would be a bit cleaner (not to mention less chance for an accidental price typo without the decimal).

What does bother me (a little) is the huge spreads in some markets. I suppose that just signals low liquidity, but anything to encourage closing the gap seems good.

@Nerva No, I wasn’t talking to anyone in particular.

I can’t se any problem in dropping decimals and I see your point when you say this would help to reach a price equilibrium more rapidly.

If you drop the limit without imposing other restrictions, it could be abused by bots automatically updating the price every time. (something that happened IRL too)

Gaps between buy and sell orders exist mainly because of the lack of people trading on the market.

Actually I take it back - I think it does bother me when I place an order for 10 of something, and then someone comes in and places an order for 500 of that thing for .01 more. That’s not “out competing” my bid, that’s cutting in line with an essentially equal bid. (Okay that’s not the back-and-forth penny war this 5 order limit fee is designed to stop I know.)

I think we might even call that kind of behavior rude or bad etiquitte. When I see small orders like that and I have a large one to place that could cut the small one off, assuming I’m posting at about the same price anyway, I usually just let the small one through first. A tiny volume order isn’t likely to impact your larger one meaningfully at all, but the same can’t be said the other way around.

Oh yeah I forgot the bots thing. Yeah that would be annoying too.

Nerva, you are following a similar train of logic that I’ve been discussing for quite some time about tick sizes.

My thoughts are throughout this thread, but condensed into later posts which start here

Cool I’ll check it out some time. Simply dropping decimals doesn’t really cut it for high priced items, and low priced stuff (<50) probably still need at least a tenths decimal level of precision. Better to fix it all in one shot really.

Ok yeah I didn’t explicitly talk about it in those two posts, but my general proposals have been to make everything 3 sig figs.

$1270.00
$1280.00
$1290.00

$9.26
$9.27
$9.28

etc etc

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